I think your first description of the marketing person was more correct.
When I received that spam on the portmaster-users list, I called the 800
number at the bottom to get more information. What I wound up with was some
guy who started going on and on about packets-per-second and reading other
technical trivia about the TNT. I explained to him several times that I was
calling about the ISP "mixup" program (make that "maxup" program) and didn't
care about TNT, unless it was in the back of a Ryder truck (there's a
fertilizer joke in there somewhere...).
After flipping around through whatever stuff he had, he figured out that he
had no clue what I was talking about and decided I had called the wrong
number. I explained to him about the e-mail from MSN and he became more
confused. Finally, he said I would need to call some other number to get
information.
So...between the spam, the wrong number in the spam, the clueless (probably
outsourced) telemarketing, TNT-brochure-mailing, call-this-other-number
telemarketer, I decided that there were now a few other reasons I didn't
care for Ascend besides the consistently higher cost-per-port on most of
their stuff.
Of course, this is all just my perception. In terms of actual use of Ascend
products, I have to admit that there is a customer-supplied P-50 sitting on
a shelf in one of our racks. It requires absolutely no attention
whatsoever, thanks to what I beleive is a very well-written snippet of code
in the P-50 that appears to automatically detect the fact that the rest of
the code is buggy and thus causes the unit to reboot itself about once a
week when things go awry. Other than the syslog messages it generates when
this happens, I'd never even know.
Damien